If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Finally got out on Sunday for the first time since August 20th. The wife has got back to long independent shopping trips, so that helped, since I dropped her off and got home just before noon, needing to meet her at the mall at 5:45pm.

About an hour to get ready, including strava setup. Not fast for the 40km, but not as bad as I thought it might be. It's good to ride in the afternoon this time of year; about 5 to 7C all the time. Ears got red but not frozen as I left the warmer in my pocket so I could hear better. Toes did get numb. Not great.

On the way home I got to ride down a monstrosity of modern transportation engineering. Google satellite doesn't show it yet. There's a nice bridge over the highway near home; nice because it doesn't have any on-ramps for the highway. I've been riding over it since it was pretty much in the country already. it used to be simply two lanes each way, and the right-hand lanes seemed slightly wide.

Well, they've sort of adopted the basic strategy of turning the four lanes into three and adding a bi-directional bicycle path such that the uphill lane is actually riding facing the downhill car traffic. (There is a hashed yellow divider, and currently I think a few bollards, but before that divider is a regular vertical curb; I didn't ride that lane uphill, so I'm not sure how nerve-wracking and/or skill-testing it really is).

Good news is I seemed to be able to just use the right-hand of the two full lanes going uphill on the way out. No real harassment, but then traffic was light. One person/car stopped at the light after it such that I couldn't get by on the right, but it could have just been random--they didn't get within inches as I have seen sometimes. The person/car behind them seemed to deliberately give me room, so I rode up to about their front wheel. When I started up, they seemed to wait for me to get going, and into the bicycle lane on the other side of the intersection, before passing me. And they soon caught up to the car I'd stayed behind. Almost like they were giving a demo to their passengers about how I wasn't holding them up.

On the way down I pretty much need to use the new bicycle lane; the main road is now mostly one lane only on that side, except for some left-turn lanes, and the left-turn lanes cause the right-hand lane to be effectively extremely narrow where you might actually need it wider. You go up and down several gutter-type curbs, and at some of those they have those weird metal plates they put near pedestrian crossings. They are beginning to use green paint on the bicycle lanes, and I'm not sure what yours is like (I thought it was very textured); this, while not excessively slippery at least when dry, does not appear deliberately textured.

At one point I saw a woman pushing her child in a push-chair up the hill in the appropriate lane, that is, towards me. Well, there was hardly any bicycle traffic so I didn't see it as an egregious abuse of the bicycle lane. But then I realized that at that point there is actually no separate pedestrian facility. In order to put the downhill left-turn lane in, they actually stole the old sidewalk at that point, making the section "mixed use". The signage isn't really finished yet (I hope).

I got to the road where I used to practice my criterium turning to right-turn into a neighbourhood that let me pick up a long-standing bicycle path. This bicycle path is unusually wide, because in reality it is the straight continuation of the rerouted downhill road. When I first started riding out there in the late 1970's the road went straight, on what is now the bicycle path. Anyway, no criterium turn now; I needed to come practically to a stop to navigate the gutter, the metal plates, and then make the turn. There is actually a continuation of the bicycle path at that point which joins up with what I use later, but I always found the road ride through the neighbourhood more pleasant, and this day I really wanted to try and get recorded on my personal strava segment; a complex 36.9 kilometers including that section.

So there seem to be several annoying features of this new bicycle path. This post might be the basis of a letter of discussion with a cycling club leader I know who I can feel out for the right approach to complaining.

The funny thing is they did a brilliant job of arranging bicycle lanes at the T-intersection at the top of the hill in question, nicely mimicking what bicycles used to do before (ride between the two lanes, knowing that there would be a number of cars turning right from the right-hand lane, which at that time was not right-turn only (although in the re-arrangement they made it right-turn only, with an island)).

I got home, about 3:30, with plenty of time to meet my wife, but ended up relaxing and meeting her just barely in time anyway.

My private strava segment had recorded, and while my time was not the slowest for it (6th slowest, 39/44) those other times had been on very windy days which this was not. Also segments always record stopped time, and the only sort of rest I took was waiting at Northfield and Hill Street for a gap to cross coinciding with a longish break in the traffic in the far lane I was crossing to. Well, apart from about 30 seconds pausing at the top of the hill in Conestogo. On some other rides I might have taken other breaks, I can't recall. (The thing is, this segment has not recorded for most of this year because of lots of construction detours which are finally finished).

Well I had been trying not to try too hard. My leg muscles did have a pleasant glow, nonetheless. The knees not too hammered.

I remember looking at the heart rate up one hill, and thinking "I must switch the monitor's upper limit from 160 to 150". But, for the first time in maybe years, I had recorded some time (43 seconds) above 160. (160 or above?) Could have been the caffeine. (Breakfast at Timmy's). Hmm. 220 - 61 = 159. Yet, by backing off up the hills somewhat, I'd never got severely out-of-breath. And I'd never actually seen the time at 160 or above; I think 155 was the most I saw. Most of the little hills were more tedious than difficult.

The most important thing about having done this ride is that it will make a big psychological difference to getting out next spring.

Last edited by SportWagon; December 5th, 2017 at 03:36 PM.
Reason: the cat => the car, plus other fixes

Downtown LA has some green lanes. I didn't get to ride them when they first went in, before the film industry bitched and moaned that it made it too hard to shoot historical things in downtown LA, and the paint was then replaced with just normal paint.

Santa Monica has the bright green thermoplast in a lot of its bike lanes. The thermoplast paint tends to have that texture to it. When it first went in, there were a couple of spots that seemed slippery when it was wet, but now I've ridden in those lanes many times in the rain and they seem fine to me. The city tells me that thermoplast is used because it's not supposed to be slippery. I'm not sure if there's something about it when it's first been applied that makes it more slippery, but like I said, I haven't had an issue with it since that very first couple of days after it was installed.